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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 1, November, 1857 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various
page 97 of 282 (34%)
hundred years of painting. Never before has there been such a collection
of the works of English painters, and never before has there been an
opportunity of studying so fully and satisfactorily the course and progress
of the English school.

The beginning of this school hardly dates before the first quarter of the
last century. Public taste was then at its lowest level. The fall of Art
in Italy, in the preceding century, had carried down with it both the
appreciation and the feeling for what was truly good. A factitious taste
had taken the place of honest and simple likings. The worst things were
often preferred, the worst pictures bought. Artists, as a class, had given
up the study of Nature as the foundation of Art; and in the place of
Nature, they had put other men's pictures. They had substituted a system
of conventional rules and traditional methods, for the infinite variety
and the unceasing study of truth. They preferred falsehood, they liked
imitation, and their patrons soon came to consider the feeble results of
falsehood and imitation as better than honest work and strong originality.
Of course, here and there was a man whose native love of truth or spirit
of opposition would give him strength to break loose from the fetters of
artistic convention and prevailing taste, and to exhibit the truth in his
pictures. Such a man was the first great artist of the English school,
Hogarth; the greatest humorist of a century rich in humorists, with a
knowledge of human nature that reminds one sometimes of Fielding's in its
clearness and variety, sometimes of Goldsmith's in its tender pleasantry.
But Hogarth had to struggle all his life against the taste of his time,
which was unable to appreciate his merit. He was too natural for an
artificial age. Among the pictures exhibited here is one from his famous
series of the Harlot's Progress. It is too well known by the engravings to
need description; but when the eight masterly pictures which compose this
series were sold at auction during Hogarth's life, they brought the sum of
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